Galway Kinnell

“It is possible I have loved you alive and dead.”

“I have always been a poet of the quotidian, of the daily, of the here and now.”

“The full sadness of time is expressed in the passing of a day.”

“The subject of the poem is the poetry of the subject.”

“The secret title of every good poem is 'Tenderness'.”

“In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization.”

“Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.”

“The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don't flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing.”

“To live in the body is to live in a mess.”

“Poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”

“The past is what it is, and it's not a sentence. It's a comma, a semicolon; it's a chapter in a book that's still being written.”

“There are moments when the body is as numinous as, and maybe more so than, the mind.”

“Trust the world...and it will be a world of trust.”

“I am one of those people who can't help getting a kick out of being alive.”

“Wait, for now. Distrust everything if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven't they carried you everywhere, up to now?”